“As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster”
With this epic, Martin Scorsese returned to the world of tough-talking Italian-American hoods featured in Mean Streets(1973), following 30 years in the lives of a group of neighbourhood crooks.
From hanging around the taxi rank, Irish/Italian punk kid Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) progresses to hijacking, airport robberies, extortion, grievous bodily harm, drug dealing, and, finally, informing to the Feds.
Along the way, he gets a Jewish wife (Lorraine Bracco) who, unlike the Corleone women, finds it impossible to keep out of the wholesale sleaze accompanying her husband’s way of life.
More important, of course, are Henry’s close male relationships: with Jimmy (Robert De Niro), a coolly violent heistman, and Tommy (Joe Pesci), an unstable psychopath with hopes of becoming a “made” man.
Ultimately, Hill is turned by the FBI and informs on his few surviving friends, winding up condemned to a Federal Witness Protection limbo where “if you ask for Spaghetti Bolognese, they give you noodles with meatballs”.
Drawn from co-writer Nicholas Pileggi’s non-fiction book Wiseguy, this is more matter-of-fact in its insider chattiness than the mythmaking The Godfather (1972).
Indeed, Goodfellas is almost a companion piece to the comical Married To The Mob (1988) as it observes the manners and fashions of the organised crime world.
Underlaid by a constant barrage of cunningly selected pop singles, from Tony Bennett to Phil Spector to Sid Vicious, this panorama of illegal America stays with a group of wholly repulsive, increasingly corrupt people for nearly two-and-a-half hours but never loses its fascination.
De Niro, underplaying in a secondary role, is quietly chilling as the repressed but unpredictable robber who sometimes seems to think he’ll only be safe once he has killed everyone he knows.
However, the show-off monster is Pesci, who plays the maniacal Tommy as a homicidal Lou Costello, segueing instantly from foul-mouthed rat-tat-tat wisecrack routines into mortifying threats or slap-in-the-face atrocities.
There are too many great moments to list: Tommy’s “You think I’m funny?” tirade in the restaurant (filmed in the closed Hawaii Kai nightclub in New York and all improvised); Jimmy sitting at a bar, not moving a muscle and yet somehow managing to convey with still, gimlet eyes that by the end of the slow zoom, he’s decided to execute Morrie the wigmaker (Chuck Low); and the breathtaking Steadicam trip through a nightclub’s kitchens (unplanned – Scorsese couldn’t get permission to go in the front way so devised the incredible sequence on the fly).
Without moralising, the film conveys the dead-end horrors of a life not just outside the law but beyond all possible law.
Ray Liotta died in his sleep on 26 May 2022, aged 67.
Henry Hill
Ray Liotta Tommy DeVito
Joe Pesci Karen Hill
Lorraine Bracco James Conway
Robert De Niro Paul Cicero
Paul Sorvino Frankie Carbone
Frank Sivero Sonny Bunz
Tony Darrow Frenchy
Mike Starr Billy Batts
Frank Vincent Morris Kessler
Chuck Low Tommy’s mother
Catherine Scorsese Tuddy Cicero
Frank DiLeo Janice Rossi
Gina Mastrogiacomo Vinnie
Charles Scorsese Karen’s mother
Suzanne Shepherd Sandy
Debi Mazar Stacks
Samuel L Jackson Spider
Michael Imperioli Henny Youngman
Henny Youngman
Director
Martin Scorsese
Video
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From hanging around the taxi rank, Irish/Italian punk kid Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) progresses to hijacking, airport robberies, extortion, grievous bodily harm, drug dealing, and, finally, informing to the Feds.
Indeed, Goodfellas is almost a companion piece to the comical Married To The Mob (1988) as it observes the manners and fashions of the organised crime world.
There are too many great moments to list: Tommy’s “You think I’m funny?” tirade in the restaurant (filmed in the closed Hawaii Kai nightclub in New York and all improvised); Jimmy sitting at a bar, not moving a muscle and yet somehow managing to convey with still, gimlet eyes that by the end of the slow zoom, he’s decided to execute Morrie the wigmaker (Chuck Low); and the breathtaking Steadicam trip through a nightclub’s kitchens (unplanned – Scorsese couldn’t get permission to go in the front way so devised the incredible sequence on the fly).
